Chapter 1

I’m twenty-four now, working a pretty standard desk job, paying too much for a studio apartment, and dealing with the usual adult stressors. But lately, I’ve been having these vivid, incredibly uncomfortable flashbacks to the place my family lived in when I was eight. It was a bleak, brick low-rise complex on the north side of the city. Unit 3A. The kind of place where the pipes hissed all winter, the carpets smelled like old dust, and the fluorescent lights in the shared hallway had a permanent, buzzing flicker.

My bedroom was the smallest room in the unit. Its far wall was shared with a narrow, dead-end utility corridor—the kind only maintenance guys use to access the building's old plumbing valves and electrical risers.

When you’re a kid, you rationalize weird things. You don't have the context to understand when something is truly off, so your brain files it away under "normal childhood quirks."

For me, that quirk was the tapping game.

It started during the winter of my eighth year. Every night, precisely twenty minutes after my dad tucked me in and turned off the overhead light, a faint sound would begin from the other side of the drywall, right behind my headboard. *Tap. Tap. Tap.* It wasn't a scary sound. It was light, rhythmic, and deliberate. Being a lonely kid who struggled to fall asleep, I eventually decided to tap back. One night, I reached up and hit the wall twice with my knuckle. *Tap-tap.*

The response from the other side was instantaneous. *Tap-tap.*

I smiled in the dark. It became our routine. If I tapped three times, the wall tapped three times. If I scraped my fingernail against the wallpaper, a matching scratching sound would follow a second later from the other side.

But as the months went on, the game changed. It became less about copying me and more about… directing me.

One night in April, I tapped my usual sequence, but the wall didn't copy it. Instead, it gave one heavy, solid thud. Then, nothing. I waited, confused, and was about to roll over when I heard a sound that made my stomach drop. It was a voice. A low, dry whisper, coming right through the plastic electrical outlet near the baseboard.

"Leo," the voice rasped. It sounded incredibly close, like someone pressing their mouth right against the plastic socket on the other side. "You left your green sneakers by the front door."

I froze under my covers. I *had* left my sneakers by the front door. My mom had told me to trip-proof the hallway before bed, but I'd forgotten.

"Go put them away," the voice whispered. "It's a fire hazard."

Terrified but entirely obedient, I scrambled out of bed, ran down the dark hallway of our apartment, moved my shoes into the closet, and sprinted back to bed. The moment my head hit the pillow, there were two soft, approving taps on the wall. *Tap-tap.*

After that night, the voice became a regular part of my life. It never threatened me, which is probably why I never told my parents.

"Did you finish your math worksheet?" the outlet would whisper on a Tuesday.

"Your mother is crying in the kitchen because she lost her keys. They are behind the microwave," the voice told me on a Friday. I went into the kitchen, looked behind the microwave, found the keys, and handed them to my frantic mom.

We moved out of Unit 3A just before my eleventh birthday. As I grew up, got a phone, went to high school, and moved out on my own, the memory of the voice in the wall faded into a bizarre, fuzzy anecdote. I eventually rationalized it as a hyper-vivid imaginary friend, a psychological coping mechanism for a kid dealing with the stress of his parents' impending divorce.

Until last night.

I was having dinner at my dad's house. My stepmom was out with friends, so it was just the two of us sitting at the kitchen island, drinking beers and talking about my recent promotion. The atmosphere was relaxed, nostalgic.

For some reason, a random thought about the old apartment popped into my head.

"Hey, Dad," I said, peeling the label off my beer bottle. "Do you remember Unit 3A? On Miller Street?"

My dad paused, his glass halfway to his mouth. "Yeah. Tough years, but we managed. Why do you ask?"

"I was just thinking about my old bedroom," I chuckled, leaning back. "Do you remember the utility corridor right behind my wall? I just remembered that I used to think the maintenance guys could hear me. I literally convinced myself someone was talking to me through the electrical outlet, telling me where mom lost her keys and stuff. Kids have the weirdest imaginations."

I expected my dad to laugh. I expected him to say something about how old buildings carry sound.

Instead, my dad set his glass down, a heavy, somber expression taking over his face. He sighed, rubbing his temples, looking older than his sixty years.

"Leo… I'm glad you brought that up, because you're actually right. Someone *was* back there. But it wasn't a game, and it wasn't your imagination."

A strange chill ran down the back of my neck. "What do you mean?"

My dad leaned in across the counter, his voice dropping to a serious, quiet tone.

"About a year after we moved in, the building superintendent was arrested. Turns out, he had built a makeshift living space inside that utility corridor. He’d bypassed the building's electrical main to power a hot plate and a small TV, and he was living back there illegally for over eighteen months."

I sat there, completely paralyzed, as my childhood memories violently collided with a much harsher reality.

"He wasn't just living there, Leo," my dad continued, his jaw tight. "The police found out he’d drilled tiny pilot holes through the drywall into several apartments to spy on the tenants. He had one right behind your electrical outlet. He knew our schedules, he heard our conversations, and he knew exactly when you were home alone."

My mind raced, remembering the items found behind the microwave, the warnings about my shoes. It wasn't magic. It wasn't a ghost. It was a man sitting in the dark, inches from my head, watching my family through a hole in the plastic socket.

"When the cops raided the corridor, they found a notebook," my dad whispered. "He had pages on you. Your routines, your grades, your toys. The night we found out, we packed everything we owned into a U-Haul and broke the lease immediately. We told you it was because of a plumbing issue because you were eight, Leo. How do you tell an eight-year-old that a stranger has been watching him sleep through the wall?"

I drove back to my studio apartment in complete silence last night.

I’m sitting in my room right now, staring at the perfectly ordinary, painted drywall behind my bed. Logically, I know I'm miles away from that old building. I know this landlord is vetted, and the building is secure.

But as I look down at the plastic electrical outlet next to my nightstand, the silence in my room feels entirely different. There are no ghosts here. Just the terrifying reminder of how vulnerable we are to the real monsters living right next door.